It's easy for us to forget that the vast majority of the world doesn't really care about (or even know about) robots. With that in mind, it's understandable why most roboticists consider robots operating "in the wild" to be "anywhere that isn't the controlled environment of my lab." But there are "real world" environments, and then there's the actual wild, and we almost never hear about research happening there. This is too bad, because we don't have nearly enough appreciation for how robots can potentially be used to mitigate problems throughout the developing world. There's also very little research into how different cultures react to robots with a social component--most human-robot interaction (HRI) studies rely on local participants who are easy (and cheap) to recruit, and are consequently full of students, which is a terrible representation of most of the rest of the world.

The Defence CRC is a collaborative program that brings together academia, publicly funded research agencies, industry (particularly small to medium enterprises) to create an interlocking research and innovation capability that is focused on driving a Defence outcome. These two signature innovation research and development programs, together with the Centre for Defence Industry Capability, deliver on the government's $1.6 billion commitment to grow Australia's defence industry and innovation sector. Minister for Defence Industry, the Hon Christopher Pyne said the first Defence CRC will focus on Trusted Autonomous Systems to deliver'game-changing' unmanned platforms that ensure reliable and effective cooperation between people and machines during dynamic military operations. "The CRC environment offers excellent synergies for Defence, industry and universities to collaborate closely on Defence innovation," Minister Pyne said.

The Department of Defence has delved into researching'Trusted Autonomous Systems' (aka, robots), as part of the Turnbull government's $50 million investment into launching the Defence Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). The Defence CRC is a collaborative program that brings together academia, publicly funded research agencies, industry (particularly small to medium enterprises) to create an interlocking research and innovation capability that is focused on driving a Defence outcome. It is a federal government initiative of the Next Generation Technologies Fund, which complements the Defence Innovation Hub as the two core initiatives of the new Defence Innovation System outlined in the Government's Defence Industry Policy Statement. These two signature innovation research and development programs, together with the Centre for Defence Industry Capability, deliver on the government's $1.6 billion commitment to grow Australia's defence industry and innovation sector. Minister for Defence Industry, the Hon Christopher Pyne said the first Defence CRC will focus on Trusted Autonomous Systems to deliver'game-changing' unmanned platforms that ensure reliable and effective cooperation between people and machines during dynamic military operations.

Yesterday, we showed you a $99 robot research (and fun) platform that you can buy instead of a $400,000 robot research (and fun) platform. There is a middle ground, though, and the newest entrant is also arguably one of the cutest and roundest: it's Qbo, who is now officially available for pre-order. Qbo is, essentially, a bunch of well-designed hardware that's intended to take all the making-a-robot out of the making-a-robot. In that respect, it's similar to the philosophy behind other robot kits: if you buy a Qbo, you don't have to worry about spending a lot of time and money (maybe most of your time and money) building a robot from scratch that does what Qbo can do. Well, that depends on what you want it to do, which in turn depends on what version you want to get and how much you want to spend.